Hitwise, like Alexa, Comscore, et al, has no direct access to logs or traffic and are thus mostly based on wild guessing. In other words, the numbers are pulled out of an orifice. Blind faith in this kind of non-science is what led to Futurama and Family Guy getting canceled.

I understand if you don't trust us to run wc -l access.log (nerd alert: yes, of course it's slightly more compliated than that) without screwing up or lying, which is why we use Google Analytics. They are very accurate, because there's a blob of Google Analytics javascript on every reddit page that lets them directly measure our traffic. (If this news freaks you out, here's how to disable it.)

Last month, we told Google to start making our Analytics data public -- that's when the dotted graph on the following page became solid:

As you can see, things are going great. (And it's mostly thanks to you guys -- thanks!) Sadly, the data on that page lags by a few months from our main Google Analytics dashboard, so you're just going to have to trust our screenshots until November. If we're lying, you'll catch us then.